Seventy-nine years ago a Jewish woman surrendered her family's $30 million painting to the Nazis in exchange for safe passage; her great-grandson walks into a courtroom to retrieve it; Museum: she forfeited her ownership rights when she accepted money from Germany.

Associated Press|Published: 12.26.18 , 18:29

The great-grandson of a Jewish woman named Lilly Cassirer, who surrendered her family's $30 million Camille Pissarro painting to the Nazis, appealed to US court Tuesday, in an attempt to retrieve the priceless painting.

Seventy-nine years ago Cassirer surrendered the Camille Pissarro painting to the Nazis in exchange for safe passage out of Nazi Germany during the WWII. Cassirer's great-grandson walked into a US courtroom for the latest round of what has been a nearly 20-year battle to get it back.

Claude Cassier, Lilly's great-grandson (Photo: TNS)

After years of appeals by both Lilly Cassirer's descendants and Spain's Thyssen-Bornemisza museum, where the painting has hung for 25 years, a trial to decide its rightful owner is scheduled before US District Judge John F. Walter.

Neither side disputes that Cassirer handed the painting over to the Nazis in 1939 in exchange for safe passage out of the country for herself, her husband and her grandson.

But the Madrid museum has argued that she forfeited her ownership rights when she accepted $13,000 from Germany in 1958, after the German government concluded the painting was lost forever. The museum also has argued that it acquired the work in good faith and has never tried to hide it.

"There's no dispute about the painting's complete history. The court examined all the evidence and determined that the museum is the rightful owner," Thyssen-Bornemisza's US attorney, Thaddeus J. Stauber, told The Associated Press in 2016 after Judge Walter initially dismissed the case.

The Cassirer family successfully appealed last year and their lawsuit was returned to the judge for trial. The family's attorney, David Boies, says the matter now boils down to Spain doing what's right and surrendering the painting.

'Rue St.-Honore, Apres-Midi, Effet de Pluie' on display in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid (Photo: TNS)

"It's unusual for a modern liberal democracy to be trying to hold onto Nazi-looted art," he said Monday as he prepared for trial. "Every other civilized country in the world is committed to returning Nazi-looted art to the rightful owners."

The painting, "Rue St.-Honore, Apres-Midi, Effet de Pluie" has been valued at $30 million or more. Pissarro created the stunning oil-on-canvas work of a rainy Paris street scene from what he saw out the window of a hotel room in 1897. Its title translates to English as "Rue Saint-Honor in the Afternoon, Effect of Rain."

Lilly Cassirer's father-in-law bought it directly from Pissarro's art dealer and left it to her and her husband when he died. Seventy-nine years ago, Cassirer surrendered the painting to the Nazis in exchange for safe passage out of Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.

For more than 70 years her family believed it was lost. Then in 1999 a friend of Cassirer's grandson, Claude, who had fled Germany with her, saw a photo of it in a catalog and contacted him.

"And he was completely stunned because we thought the painting was gone," Claude Cassirer's son, David Cassirer of San Diego, told The Associated Press in 2016.

It turned out the work had been sold and resold several times before Baron Hans-Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, one of the 20th century's most prominent art collectors, bought it from New York gallery owner Stephen Hahn in 1976.

Thyssen-Bornemisza, who died in 2002, sold the painting and hundreds of other works to Spain in 1993 and they now form the core of the museum named for him.